Coinbase Valuation Jumps from $1.6 Billion to as High as $8 Billion

The meteoric price rally by bitcoin in 2017 has made a lot of people very rich, and perhaps no one more than the owners of the trading venues themselves. Coinbase, which was valued at around $1.6 billion less than a year ago, is now priced at $8 billion by its investors.

The $8 Billion Unicorn

San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has reportedly seen its market valuation skyrocket to as high as $8 billion. To help put this figure into perspective, Nasdaq Inc., which operates the NASDAQ market and eight European stock exchanges, only has a market cap of less than $15 billion.

Last summer, before the bitcoin trading mania reached its peak around the end of 2017, Coinbase was priced by VC investors at an approximated $1.6 billion. Unsurprisingly, the incredible revenues that period, when the price of bitcoin was at its height, brought to cryptocurrency exchanges across the world made their owners reevaluate such low previous offers, as was recently reported in the case of Binance.

Earn Deal Details

Last month the company acquired Earn.com (formerly known as 21 Inc), a service that allows senders to pay users in cryptocurrency to reply to emails and complete tasks. New details from the negotiations by the two sides about that deal reveal that the management of Coinbase valued their exchange at $8 billion.

The acquisition was valued at $100 million, and at least part of the sum was offered to the founders and investors of Earn in the shape of Coinbase stock. As the company’s shares are not traded on a public stock exchange, the offer was based on the self estimation of Coinbase for its worth, from which the $8 billion figure comes.

And the incredible rise in the valuation of the company isn’t just internally-based. Brokers have reportedly turned to Coinbase stock owners in recent weeks with offers to buy existing shares at a price that will place the total value of the exchange between $4.5 billion and $6 billion, according to people familiar with the offers cited by Silicon Valley media Recode.

Do you think $8 billion is a fair valuation of Coinbase? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock.

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Avi Mizrahi is an economist and entrepreneur who has been covering Bitcoin as a journalist since 2013. He has spoken about the promise of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology at numerous financial conferences around the world, from London to Hong-Kong.

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